Oct. 30, 2009 SDF Collaboration

On October 30, 2009 at Techmart in Santa Clara, SDForum hosted â€œCollaboration 2.0: Collaborating in the Next Decadeâ€. Using social media at work is collaboration. So many consumers are adopting and using social networking and web applications at home that it is starting to find its way into the workplace. Companies incorporate these new tools to improve productivity and combine disparate resources around the globe. They create content and build engaging communities. Online collaboration not only augments old ways of doing things, it improves mindshare, transparency, and creates a sense of community among coworkers. It adds value for customers and opportunities for new investment.

James Lundy of Gartner Research gave the opening keynote. He said the traditional IT structure is vulnerable and the users are out of control. It is the Wild West all over again.

Harold Yu of Orrick moderated panelists Salim Ali of SAP, Roosevelt Bynum of IBM, Chuck Ganapathi of Salesforce.com, Didier Moretti of Cisco Systems, Perry Teevens of Skype and Matt Thompson of Microsoft. They talked about â€œThe Incumbent Perspective on Collaborationâ€. Big corporations are not only collaborating internally, they see it as they way to find and keep customers. Legacy IT systems must give way for the Facebook generation. If the IT department doesnâ€™t keep up, employees and customers will bypass it.

Danny Wallace of PricewaterhouseCoopers held a fireside chat on â€œUse Case Study â€“ Real Time Collaboration – End User Customer Perspectiveâ€ with Prashant Nema of SVB Financial Group and Mark Plakias of Orange Labs. Unstructured collaboration allows free-flowing ideas between multiple parties. Plakias thinks of online collaboration as a low-cost, low-threshold way to round up research inputs.

Frank Marino of Frank Rimerman Consulting moderated panelists Michael Ashley of FastPencil, Ivan Koon of YouSendIt, Ross Mayfield of Socialtext and Aaron Levie of Box.net. They discussed â€œEmerging Talents that are Changing the Business Model – Whatâ€™s the Next Big Thing?â€ When collaboration and technology create value, the money and talent follow. The average employee spends twenty percent of their week looking for information. Collaboration is dirty, until you allow people to argue, break rules, and mess things up, you won’t get innovation.

Anthony Ha of Venture Beat moderated venture capitalists Asheem Chandna of Greylock and Sharon Wienbar of Scale Venture Partners. They discussed â€œA Look at the Investment Landscapeâ€ You must get new customers within a certain period. This is a metric used to evaluate startups. Investors are looking for broad adoption even if the deal size is small. The “try before buy” model means software has to deliver quickly. Everyone is trying to figure out how to become the Twitter or Facebook for the enterprise when it will probably be Twitter and Facebook.

Chris Yeh of PBWorks moderated panelists Kailash Ambwani of FaceTime, Margaret Francis of Scout Labs, Ryan Holmes of HootSuite, Nanda Kishore of ShareThis and Seth Sternberg of Meebo. They discussed â€œSocial Collaboration and the Consumerâ€. Collaboration is about people not technology. If you want to learn about collaboration start using the tools. Consumers will break down barriers to get what they want. You want to be there with a solution when it happens. Eighty percent of Generation Y use social networking for both business and personal use already. Privacy and security are big concerns. Social media is not like Vegas, what happens on Facebook, doesn’t actually stay on Facebook. Chris Yeh said a collaboration tool only works if it helps people do more and not get in the way.